To Love A Human
by Queen Thief
Summary: Bunny thinks that Jack Frost is not likely to ever see him as anything more than a giant rabbit, and he accepts this dutifully. However the chemistry between the two is as obvious as Jack's reciprocated feelings for the Pooka, even if Bunny has a hard time seeing it. [Oneshot]


_Hey guys. So, I've never shipped anything like this before, and all I can blame it on is that half the movie was literally spent developing this relationship, and the personalities are so well matched, that I didn't have a choice but to ship it._

_Below is a Bunnymund/Jack fic, which may (May. Don't get your hopes up) turn into a longer fic that features Human!Bunnymund/Jack. For now, I thought I'd throw it up here and see if anyone liked it enough. If you do, maybe comment, and tell me what you liked, so I know where to take this. I'm not promising smut, but I'm not not promising it either. We'll see where the fic goes, and if it goes anywhere. There's like, 5,000 words of it written so far, but tons to go still, so… Yeah. Hope you like, and if enough people want it, I'll continue._

_(Also, just a note on the Australian slang: I'm Australian myself, so I basically wrote this from Bunny's point of view, and mixed the slang he used in the movie with phrases I use day-to-day. If I've never used it, it ain't in here.)_

_And because every fic needs a title…_

**To Love a Human**

Jack Frost was an enigma.

The boy had come out of nowhere, and his first impression made on E. Aster Bunnymund was not a good one. The little blighter had frozen half a continent on Easter Sunday of '68, and the look he had given Bunny when the Pooka had caught him in the act had been nothing short of awestruck.

Standing on an ice-glazed road in bare feet and a threadbare brown cloak, just looking at him had made Bunny feel cold. The tips of the boy's white hair trembled in the harsh wind.

Jack swallowed a few times, as if his throat had gone dry at the sight of Bunny.

"You…" He paused. "You can…. see me?" And then, as if it was an afterthought; "What _are_ you?"

Bunny remembered how his own eyebrows had arched at the question.  
"Very funny. You must be Jack Frost," he said, his accent as thick back then as it ever was. "North's been yappin' my ear off about you since last Christmas."  
Jack opened his mouth – maybe to question who exactly "North" was, seeing as how the poor kid could not have possibly known all those years ago – but Bunny cut him off.  
"Look kid," he said with an angry snarl to his words, "I ain't North, and I sure ain't as impressed with you as he is. Your freezing everything might make him happy when he delivers prezzies to kids at Christmas, but my eggs don't need to be buried under six feet of snow!"

He took a step forward then, one furry, paw-like finger jabbing Jack in the chest. The boy jolted back as if he had been electrocuted by the contact.  
Bunny hissed, "So quit with the bloody blizzard already!"

The snow _had_ quit after that – had just cut off so abruptly that it was almost as if there had been some leak in the sky that was suddenly patched up – and Bunny remembered all too well how he had then tapped a foot on the ground, and vanished down the hole that opened up as a result. He was sure that whatever had been on his mind that had made him leave so fast was Easter-related. He had probably been thinking of ways he could salvage the eggs before the snow did any more damage than just making the little buggers too hard for kids to find. _Of course_ he would have thought nothing of his encounter with Jack back then. He had not known at the time that the poor kid was missing his memories, or that their meeting was probably the first time Jack had been seen – been talked to, been _touched_ – in over a century. How could he have possibly known back then that Jack had been all alone in the world for so very long, that he probably had thought that all the stories children were told about the Guardians were just fables concocted by parents to keep their little ankle-biters quiet.

Bunny remembered overhearing a conversation long after that, between Jack and North. It happened not too long after Pitch's defeat, when North had called the Guardians to his workshop to celebrate the upcoming Christmas.  
North and Jack had retreated to the warmth of North's office as they talked, and the start of the conversation had been something mundane – Sandy's constant snoozing, if Bunny remembered right – but somehow the topic had evolved into a retrospective of Jack's initial views of the Guardians.

"Well," Jack had started, pulling his legs up onto the windowsill where he sat, hugging them close to his body, "at the time, I just thought what I was seeing was all part of being a… _whatever I was_. I saw sand coming down from the sky at night, but I couldn't see where – well, _who_ – it was coming from. And it's not like I watched kids sleep at night to see if fairies really did come and take their teeth. Christmas and Easter… I just thought the parents were leaving the gifts and the eggs. I never thought much of it until… until I met Bunny. And he mentioned you, and I started…" Jack paused, looking for the right word. "I started _investigating_."

North had sat down beside the boy then, making the wood of the windowsill creak with his added weight. He laid one large sure hand on Jack's shoulder.  
"Is all past now, Jack, yes?" he said. "We are sorry we not find you sooner, and tell you about things like Man in Moon, and what it is we do for children."  
Jack looked up then, and smiled at the reassurance. His smile was a beautiful sight; always had been, even when Bunny had been too peeved off at him to admit it.  
Jack must have seen him then, peeking around the corner of the door into North's office from the hallway, because the boy had arched up slightly and tilted his body to try glimpsing around the door, calling, "Bunny?"

Bunny had not answered. He had darted back to the main hall of the workshop before Jack was even up on his feet.

…

A lot had changed over the past year. Bunny and Jack had gone from a less-than-friendly rivalry to something of a comradeship. Jack probably thought it had something to do with his having become a Guardian, but to Bunny, it was more than that. Jack Frost had been the one to inspire belief in The Easter Bunny, when almost every last child in the world had given up on the idea. Their newfound friendship had also bloomed from Bunny's finally being able to puzzle out why Jack messed with his egg hunts year after year for so long – The kid had been _lonely_, and since Bunny was the first one to see him, of course the poor misguided little bugger was going to pull out all the stops to make Bunny show his face again.

Bunny now felt more than a little guilty that all of Jack's attempts at sabotage since that infamous blizzard in '68 had been met with a stony silence, and Bunny simply working extra hard behind the scenes to modify his egg hunts so that they could be conducted despite any freak cold fronts.

But that was all in the past. It had been a few years now since that fateful battle with the Boogeyman, and nowadays, Jack Frost was a welcome sight in Bunny's everyday life.

In fact, Bunny's newfound love of encountering the winter sprite was becoming… something of a problem.

Tooth and her fairies weren't the only ones anymore, who went weak in the knees when Jack Frost came a-calling.

"Bunny!"

The shiver that had taken a habit of surging down Bunny's spine whenever that unexpectedly low voice called out his name was quickly becoming a nuisance. He fought to keep painting the egg in his hand, trying to focus on the meticulous strokes of colour across the smooth surface of the shell, instead of the way icy breath misted his fur and frosted his whiskers as Jack leaned over his shoulder.

"I like that one," Jack said airily, as even the temperate wind down in the Warren seemed to favor him enough to bend to his whim and keep his form hovering a few feet off the ground. "Good choice of colour."

Bunny snorted a soft laugh. "Of course you'd say that."  
The egg was painted a collection of blues, with a fine trail of white patterns winding in spiraling patterns over it's circumference; a tribute to Jack Frost that Bunny had not even realised he'd been making.  
Bunny did not see the cane that snuck under his arm until it tapped the egg just hard enough to send the little oval popping out of his hands and up into the air. Jack caught it first in pale, slender fingers, and retreated with it, hopping up on to his cane that he had dug into the ground. He perched on it like a bird, turning the egg over in his hand with an appraising expression.

"Wow, Bunny," he said. "I thought you were all about spring-time paints and pastels. I like this new kick." He traced a finger over the egg as he spun it slowly in his hand. Frost appeared in a trailing floral pattern, overlapping the design that Bunny had been half through painting on the egg.

"Oi, you little dingo," Bunny said, getting to his feet. At six foot one, he still had to look up at Jack whenever that cane made its way into the picture. "Give that back!"  
Jack held it up higher. "But I'm hungry. That's what eggs are for, right? To be eaten. So I'll just take this one, okay?" He mimed putting it in his mouth, and Bunny watched those thin, teasing lips opening extra wide in order to try and hide the smirk pulling at their corners.  
Bunny shut his eyes, shook his head for a moment – like that would somehow do something to clear the horribly uncouth thoughts rushing into it – and then grit his teeth in annoyance. He moved forward, swiping at the egg, and Jack let out a short yelp as his cane-turned-perch was jostled.

The egg dropped from Jack's grasp. Bunny moved forward to grab it, but a sudden gust of wind caught it and lifted it higher into the air, where it spun showily in front of an equally airborne Jack Frost. The boy smirked, plucking the egg out of the air.

"Oi, mate!" Bunny said. "If you wanna eat something, get one of the eggs that aren't painted and leave my dolled-up googies alone! Easters only a few days away and I can't afford to waste time painting eggs for nothing, you know!"

"Oh, I know," Jack said indulgently. Bunny could have sworn he saw a fond smile working its way over that deceptively angelic face. "Tell you what, Cottontail, we'll trade!"

Bunny watched Jack produce a small piece of paper from the front pocket of his hoodie. He let it fall from his grasp, before descending in his altitude to follow it as it drifted earthward. The coloured square fluttered into Bunny's outstretched hand. It was torn and smudged, with heavy indents of pencil that had been rubbed out and redrawn multiple times to get the message just right.

It started with "Dear Santa," before divulging into a long list of which toys would make perfect Christmas presents for a little girl. All over the page, there were crude but endearing drawings of things like pink ponies, and stars with smiley faces on them. Down the bottom, the last line was as rife with spelling mistakes and backwards-drawn letters as the rest of the page, but it was legible enough. It said, "And please say hello to the Easter Bunny for me. Love, Sophie."

Bunny felt something warm and almost painful welling up in his chest.  
"Precious little ankle-biter," he whispered under his breath.  
A hum of agreement right next to his ear made him start. Jack was floating there, reading over his shoulder. His eyes were softer nowadays than when they had first met, so moments like this – when his expression softened even further because of some emotional milestone – always made Jack's face just… near unbearably beautiful of a sight.

"She just learned to write this year," Jack said with a fond nostalgic smile. "This was the first letter North got this year. I guess she sent it extra early so you could see it before Easter."  
Something was building in Bunny the longer he watched Jack. Oh, there was always something that happened to him around Jack – something akin to a sort of short-circuiting throughout his nervous system that he could not explain – but now it was getting out of hand. There was an itch developing in his fingers that made him want to reach out and – and what? Pull Jack into his arms and just_hold him?_ Oh yeah, that would go down absolutely _bonza_.

But Bunny's body was not the only one in the conspiracy, apparently. No, his mind had also taken on the task of dredging up memories of himself and Jack, perched atop one of the hilltops in the Warren, and all but nursing little Sophie between them. But the memory was traitorous, haloing Jack with a soft, gentle haze that made those extraordinary eyes of his seem amazingly clear and alluring, as they gazed up at Bunny with something like–

"Bunny?" Jack's voice was accompanied by an egg bouncing in and out of his line of vision, little flakes of sparkling frost falling from it as Jack tossed it in one hand to grab his attention.  
Bunny blinked and Jack laughed.  
"There you go," he said. "Man, Bunny, where's your head today? You had this really glazed look in your eyes just now." Jack's face was suddenly far too close, and Bunny's eyes widened, his ears flattening and his nose twitching in a fight or flight instinct that came from having an echo of animal instinct tucked snugly somewhere below his mostly human sensibilities.  
"Uh…" Bunny fumbled for coherency, as those frost-blue eyes stared up inquiringly into his own forest-green ones. A clash of opposites; that was what it seemed to always come down to with the two of them; Spring and summer. Seriousness and fun. Animal and… _human_.

Bunny's ears flattened further at the thought, and he stepped backwards, away from Jack.

Jack seemed surprised at that, but then his eyes moved from Bunny's, raking up and down the Pooka's form, narrowed in scrutiny. He backed off after a few minutes, and Bunny hoped that Jack could not see the way his chest was heaving beneath his thick down of fur. His heart was still beating fast as Jack floated backwards on a gentle tide of wind that rippled around his feet.

Jack gave a chuckle that seemed a little breathless.  
"Well, you don't seem sick," Jack said, slipping around Bunny and walking away, drumming his fingers on his staff in something that almost looked like a nervous gesture if Bunny didn't remind himself that this was _Jack Frost_ he was dealing with. Bunny turned to watch him go, seeing a small sphere lying on the ground only a little ways away, with a tiny picture of the workshop in the Pole shimmering inside it.

North's snow globe, Bunny realized. Well, that explained how the little blighter got down into the Warren in the first place.

"All the same, make sure to take care of yourself, Peter Cottontail," Jack said. "Can't have you getting sick this close to Easter." Jack twirled his staff absentmindedly in one hand, walking toward the snow globe. "And, speaking of, I better get back before our jolly old friend sends the yetis to get me by stuffing me in that sack again." He smiled a fond farewell and retreated, walking backwards, with one hand tucked casually in the front pocket of his blue hoodie. Bunny only realised Jack was hiding the egg in there when the boy bent down to retrieve the globe. He did it so carefully that it was obvious he was trying to make sure the egg didn't fall out.

"Oi!" Bunny called, rushing forward, startling Jack so much that he jerked and the egg slid out of his pocket, and was caught quickly by Bunny in a sure hand. Bunny let out a relieved breath, before holding the egg up proudly, teasingly, in front of Jack.

Bunny smirked and let out a laugh. An answering grin blossomed on Jack's face.

Suddenly, the ground beneath Bunny's feet became slippery, and while his arms pinwheeled uselessly to try and stop him from falling, Jack snatched the egg from his hands and slid past him on a thin trail of ice that only Jack Frost could make seem like a wave to be surfed upon.  
He called, "You want it? Come get it, Cottontail!"  
Bunny slipped off the ice and regained his footing, feeling a sincere smile stretching his lips without permission. He thrummed a foot on the ground and grinned.  
"I already told you. You don't wanna race a rabbit, mate."  
The ground caved in on itself and Bunny disappeared into the opening.

He popped up a second later, in front of Jack, who swerved his trail of ice to try and avoid a near collision. The result was Bunny being able to jump over Jack and snatch the egg from his grasp. The Pooka had his prize for all of two seconds before Jack's new ice trail materialized in front of him, as Jack chucked a U-e and plucked the egg from his hand.

Fun.

The word was something that Bunny had not associated with himself for a long time, perhaps even since back during a time when he was not known as "Bunny", but rather as "Aster"; back before he became a Guardian. No. Rather, before he became the last of his kind.

The Guardians were wonderful and welcoming, like a family. But talking to North and Tooth and Sandy had always been "nice", or "enjoyable", and painting eggs and giving them to children had always fallen in the same vein. It was nice, and pleasant, and rewarding, but if there was any fun to be had it was in the slow drawl of conversation, or the lazy strokes of a paintbrush, or the leisurely wait for the children to find their beloved Easter Eggs.

Bunny had never really thought of anything he did as particularly "fun". At least, not in the way he defined it. "Fun" was a fast paced race through a wooden grove in the Warren, bouncing off trees and narrowly avoiding snowballs, as the laughter of an absolute angel filled the air. "Fun" was his heart beating wildly, and small pants of laughter escaping him whenever a tiny painted egg changed hands by hook or by crook. "Fun" was his long dormant muscles burning from a new, rigorous run on the shifting terrain of grass-ice-grass beneath his feet, before he leaped into the air and took a surprised Jack – held aloft there in the wind's gentle embrace – completely by surprise.

"Fun", it turned out, for Bunnymund, could only now be found in one entity; Jack Frost. And if that wasn't love, then Bunny didn't know what was.


End file.
